March 23, 2015

What The Brand Babblers Don't Understand

Imagine for a second that you're the brand manager for BigSave supermarkets.

Your job is to build the BigSave brand so that customers prefer you to SaveMore, and HugeSave.

You know how wonderful BigSave is. You want to spread the word. You want consumers to see inside your brand. You want them to know how responsive you are, and how pleasant you are to engage with, and how willing you are to work with them and help them.

Building the brand is absolutely essential to your career and central to your life. Once you leave the house in the morning, it is the most important thing you do.

Now let's talk about the average consumer. The average consumer couldn't give a flying shit about BigSave.

If BigSave exploded tomorrow, the average consumer wouldn't bother picking up the donuts.

The average consumer has other things on her mind. Like why she gained 2 pounds last week, and why her father is looking pale, and why the fucking computer keeps losing its WiFi signal, and why Timmy's teacher wants to see her next week, and what's that bump she noticed on her arm?

The point is this: our brands are very important to us marketers and very unimportant to most consumers. Please read that again.

Are there some brands each of us are attached to? Sure. Are there brands we buy regularly? Sure. Is our attachment to a handful of brands strong and nonsensical? Sure. The problem is we buy stuff in hundreds of categories and are strongly attached to only a few brands.

The idea that our attachment represents "love" or any of the other woolly nonsense perpetrated by brand hustlers is folly.

The clearest demonstration of the weakness of the cult of brands is the dismal performance of social media marketing. We were promised that social media would be the magic carpet on which our legions of brand advocates would go to spread the word about the marvelousness of our brands, and would free us from the terrible, wasteful expense of advertising. It has done nothing of the sort.

In fact, it is often the exact opposite. Social media is usually where people go to scream about the mistreatment we get at the hands of companies. And where companies go to beg forgiveness.

A recent study reported that among a brand’s fans, only .07% — that’s 7 in ten thousand — ever engage with the brand’s Facebook posts. On Twitter the number is even lower — 3 in ten thousand. And these are not average consumers. These are the brands so-called "fans." (This is a correction from the original post which had the number at .7%)

A study I quoted here recently by Havas claims that “in Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared.”

Having a successful brand is very important to a marketer. But the idea that it is anything like that to a consumer is folly. Brand babble is just the faulty conflation of marketers' needs and consumers' interests.

Modern marketing is operating under the delusion that
consumers want to interact with brands, and have relationships with
brands, and brand experiences, and engage with them, and co-create with
them.

- there are many ways for BigSave to be a special brand that customers will care about and drive an extra 10 minutes to: make it a place where they feel special, or find better products, or...

- some categories are brand first and the product is very detached and almost irrelevant: beer, fragrancies, high-end fashion. This is usually because the product is commoditized, or the regular buyer can't tel the difference between one and the other and needs to rely on a cognitive shortcut (appeal, advice...)

- don't make the mistake that other people make, by looking at what is and considering it the way it's meant to be. The few successful brands out there (that 92% in Europe and North America declines to 73% globally) are not a statistical anomaly, they're evidence that it's possible to create brands that people consider special and worthy of extra attention, feelings or cash. It's just that we're doing an absolutely terrible job of it. You've been in the industry long enough to see it first hand, and in reality a three-months intern would recognize that, even without the evidence brought by research.

Social media is a place where people go to communicate with each other. Marketing through it? I liken it to picking up the telephone in 1982 and being forced to listen to a :60 radio spot before being allowed to dial my mum.

Bob- All too often you describe to thoughts and actions held by a client. After using FB as a flat out advertising platform failure, it was decided to use FB and their email list to push a newsletter - "a fun, relaxed, non-pushy approach to selling their services". Yes, you have every right to criticize me for the question. How do you deal with client who insists on using such horseshit wasting time, money and causing distraction (fromthe fallout of yet another failure?) Input from a seasoned agency guy would be appreciated.

Yes. As a matter of fact, my number was wrong. It's actually ten times WORSE than the number I quoted. I'm about to correct the blog. The source is Forrester Research: http://blogs.forrester.com/nate_elliott/14-04-29-instagram_is_the_king_of_social_engagement

Marketing babblers babble about two things more than anything: social media and data. Data shows us that social media accounts for little less than 0.07% of traffic to most websites. Social shows us that people are angry trolls with a tenuous grasp of grammar. After all these years I still cannot understand why marketeers keep circlejerking about social media. Is it sexier than PPC, SEO and email? At what point did marketers start to care more about thumbs-up than dollar signs?

Odd, considering that the advertisers we have (I run a prominent website for yacht and sailboat racing) who use Facebook and Twitter alongside promoted content and banner ads say that Facebook is the single biggest source of new, paying customers. One of my more creative clients wrote me last week about the relationship between paid ads and social: "We've worked with your site and Twitter serve to funnel potential customers to our Facebook, and it's amazing how quickly those turn into personal contact, recurring online relationships, and sales." Our successful advertisers say that the most important part of social marketing is the person behind the screen. Another conversation last month. "Since 2008 we've had a succession of 'kids' running our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook feeds, figuring they knew their way around best. Finally we hired a top sales associate to run the show, and our digital sales have grown by over 300% in six months."

Woe betide any of us who assume for even a second that anybody else gives a hoot about what what's important to us. As marketers, it's our job to make it care-worthy. I think every marketing conference should redesign those little suede-jacket-ruining nametags they pass out to read: "Hi, I'm (Bill). And nobody else cares,"

In fairness, traditional media doesn't make the outlandish claims that online and social do. They don't call magazine readers or television viewers 'fans'. Also, the post above isn't trying to compare online and traditional; it's pointing out that brands are not as important to the everyman as they are to marketers.

Thanks for the quote of our study "meaningful brands". Totally agree with your post. Only a few brands really add real value to people´s life, and is basically thanks to product performance, because solve a problem or cover a need...nothing to do with conversations, relationships, engagements...just VALUE

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans.""As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."